A. Field of the Invention
This method and apparatus relates to providing an early warning system to detect the presence of illegal riders on trains and employs many of the same features that are found in the previously referenced applications. This type of technology is particularly suited to the railroad industry but can have other applications as well.
Often times, illegal riders will board trains to travel from place to place and particularly across borders. It is, however, cost prohibitive to stop every train and inspect every rail car. This system greatly reduces the cost and maximizes the efficiency of a type of early warning system to detect illegal riders thus minimizing the stoppage of entire trains with the attendant costs of delay and provides a readable format at a remote facility.
B. Prior Art
Many other prior art references exist which deal with security systems and in particular container security systems. Some of these container security systems employ radio frequency identification tags, RFID tags.
A representative example in the prior art that teaches container security can be found at Easley, U.S. Pat. No. 7,094,784. Easley teaches a system that monitors the contents of the interior of the container using electronic means to transmit this information to a remote facility. Another example can be found at Stratmoen U.S. Pat. No. 7,002,472 which teaches a smart and secure container. The container has a means to access the cargo and certain predetermined factors are selected that when violated would determine a possible breach to the container. The information about the breach is then forwarded to a central data collection station.
The use of RFID tags to monitor activity is found in the prior art and examples of patents that teach this technology include Nowak, U.S. Pat. No. 7,123,149 and Hornbacker, U.S. Pat. No. 7,047,103.
A system that teaches the tracking of goods through a variety of tracking stations can be found at Clift, U.S. Pat. No. 7,126,470. Clift, however, is an inventory control system and does not specifically address the issue of container breach or the detection of illegal riders.
There are other systems in the prior art that teach article tracking methods and systems including real time tracking of goods and examples of this type of device and method can be found at Chung, U.S. Pat. No. 7,036,729 and Li, U.S. Pat. No. 7,136,832. Both the Chung and Li patents use RFID technology in the tracking methods.
None of the prior art references teach a system that combines technology that detects the presence of a container breach or the presence of an illegal rider in one system that provides a panoramic view of the information such that the exact location of a breach or an illegal rider can be pinpointed.